Rocket mortgage

Case Study

Dynamically Displaying Solutions

In an effort to comply with my non-disclosure agreement, I have omitted confidential information and may have made changes to fill in the blanks in this case study. All information is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of Rocket.

Getting Started

Nation's Largest Home Mortgage Lender

At the time, Rocket Mortgage was the flagship consumer-facing product for Quicken Loans and was credited as being the first fully online mortgage experience. Over time, the product became bigger than the company to end up being the brand (read about that in another case study).

One of the challenges with being first is that you can get stuck in your ways and quickly become 2nd or even last. We were not about to let that happen and looked for many ways to innovate our product.

Context

A Shopping Cart for a Home Mortgage

Purchasing a home is the largest transaction that most people will ever make. Historically, this process was done face-to-face with a local mortgage banker and was a very relational experience. Since Quicken Loans revolutionized the industry with Rocket Mortgage, this experience became fully (or mostly) digital.

Business

Business Perspective

How to Scale Without Adding More People
When you are in business as long as Quicken Loans (they started in 1985) you have dialed in the efficiencies of the operations and things are running like a well-oiled machine. This is great for business but can be a challenge when you’re looking to scale the business because the only way to do that is to hire more people which isn’t always best for business.

Sell Like a Banker
Similar to the aforementioned operational efficiencies, Quicken Loans has one of the best mortgage banker training programs in the industry. Pass rates are in the high 90s! These folks are good at what they do and can close loans like it’s nobody’s business (except for theirs’). Imagine if the digital experience could be as good at selling mortgages as the bankers are.

The Challenge

How Might We Make the Digital Experience More Human?

In the digital experience, there isn’t a live human able to counter objections, provide alternatives or close the sale. Live mortgage brokers outperformed the digital experience considerably but comes at a drawback when trying to scale as you need to hire more humans to grow.

Goals

Simplify Offer Presentation

Reduce the cognitive load for users so that they are not overwhelmed with too many options.

Adapt with User Goals

Allow users to modify their goals to find the right offer.

Bring the Offline Mortgage Banker Experience Online

Discover what works in the offline experience to improve the online experience.

My Role

Millions of Visitors, Billions of Dollars in Mortgages and One, Small but Mighty Team

I had the pleasure to build and lead the design team for Rocket Mortgage from a team of 4 to over 16 (and growing) in the support of multiple apps for B2B, B2C and Internal Teams.

The team on this project was pretty small with a UX Researcher, Content Writer, UI Designer with my assistance as UX Lead. We partnered closely with a Product Manager and Engineering.

Design

Research

Content

Product

Eng

As a cross-functional team, we worked closely together to define the problem, dig into the data, and observe behaviors of our Mortgage Bankers as well as our users to approach the problem from both user and business perspectives.

In this case study, we will look at the steps we took and insights we gathered from discovery through delivery.

Research

Observing Mortgage Bankers and Customers

We wanted to find out what works successfully in the offline world where bankers talk directly to customers to see if we could replicate it online. We conducted research into best practices for solution presentations from both the banker's and client's point-of-view. This research was used to complete a review of existing pages and as a guiding principle during the design process.

Bankers

We talked to 8 bankers at Quicken Loans in 30-minute, in-depth, semi-structured interviews.

8 Bankers

Semi-Structured Interviews

:30 Minute

The types of things we wanted to find out:

How do our top-performing bankers' approach solution presentations?

How do bankers best present solution components to alleviate client concerns & objections?

Clients

We talked to 15 recently closed clients through 15-minute, structured phone interviews.

15 Clients

Structured Phone Interviews

:15 Minute

The types of things we wanted to find out:

What common client attitudes & behaviors can we leverage to optimize solution presentations?

Where did clients desire additional information or clarity when selecting a mortgage solution?

Additional Research

We also looked into the behaviors of users who seemed to experience frustration with the current solution through review of analytics, Fullstory clips and anecdotal feedback from the customer care team.

The Solution

Opportunities

Based on the insights gathered in our research phase observing bankers and clients, as well as through viewing analytics and Fullstory clips of user behavior of the current experience, we came up with two core opportunities to explore.

1. Minimize Cognitive Load

Current-day solutions are displayed to clients with all information thrown at them at once. It’s clear that they don’t understand everything presented to them.

Hypothesis

Displaying solutions to our clients in smaller chunks and explaining why we selected something for them just like a banker does will increase click-through and urgency to continue.

2. Tie Solutions to Client Goals

When a banker is going through a loan application with a client they are asking questions to get at their motivation and goals for the loan or refinance.

Hypothesis

Giving users the ability to change their goals and see how that impacts the offer solution would increase the clarity of how a recommended loan solution benefits the client.

Lo-Fi Wireframes

Iteration 1
We designed a couple of potential lo-fi wireframe prototypes and did user testing to determine which version resonated best with the user. We found that there were certain aspects that they liked best from one to the other but our first pass wasn’t quite right and was still too much information all at once. Our biggest takeaway from user testing was that we needed to still simplify the solution, even more, to increase comprehension, clarity, and focus.

Iteration 2

In the updated version, all 6 participants tested stated they found the one solution at a time flow very useful in helping them understand the recommended loan option and all 6 chose the same options from multiple choice questions regarding their attitude toward the screen.

Additional Enhancements

As we moved into hi-fi prototyping and additional testing we found a few other areas that we enhanced and optimized for greater usability and even more simplification of the initial offer presentation.

Tooltips and Contextual Content

How to describe terms for our clients and provide breakdowns for how we determined the principal amount, closing costs, and monthly payments.

Question:

How might we create a dynamic tooltip that shows the description of the term and how numbers are calculated?

Solution:

Dynamic content in expandable cards.

Clients

Current day, clients may customize their loan solution via drop menus with Interest Rate and Points combined into a single field.

Question:

How might we allow clients to modify their solution more granularly?

Solution:

Convert the drop menus to sliders for greater interaction and customization.

Results

The Impact

Success metrics showed that the initial launch of the Dynamically Displaying Solutions features exceeded expectations and became the standard solutions presentation across not only B2C products but also was folded into the B2B experience and some internal applications.

78%

Satisfaction score in understanding the presented loan solutions (went up from 53%)

34%

Reduction in loans that are taken offline to talk to a banker